'I could cry': Schalke imploding as winless run approaches 11 months | OneFootball

“I’ve had enough,” Mark Uth told Sky Sports last Saturday.

He had just played 90 minutes as Schalke’s run without a Bundesliga win extended to 24 games.

This weekend’s opponents are Borussia Mönchengladbach, who happen to be the last side Schalke took three points from. That result sent them fourth in the Bundesliga, above bitter rivals Borussia Dortmund, on 17 January 2020.

They’ve lost 15 of their 24 Bundesliga games since, scoring just 12 goals, conceding 61, and picking up a measly nine points. They are bottom of the table, one of just two winless sides in 2020/21.

“It’s so sad here, every time, to just play such helpless football,” Uth continued in a post-match interview brimming with honesty, emotions still running high as Wolfsburg left the pitch having coasted to a 2-0 win.

“We are one step too late every time. Every time. We’re not making challenges anymore, we didn’t even get a yellow card, we just can’t make the challenges. I don’t know how we’re supposed to win a game like this. I find it incredible. Honestly, I just don’t know what else to say.

“We aren’t giving up but what are we supposed to do? We just have to keep going. There are no easy opponents, next week we have to play away.

“It’s nonsense to say we’ve given up but, at the moment, I’m just done with it, I’m so angry. I could just go into the dressing room and cry.”

There is, simply, no light at the end of the tunnel. This week, Schalke have somehow managed to prove that Uth’s interview wasn’t even close to rock bottom.

Training on Sunday was ended early after a clash between former fan favourite Naldo, now on the coaching staff, and veteran striker Vedad Ibisevic.

The pair had to be separated by the other players and Schalke announced on Tuesday that Ibisevic, signed for free in the summer, would be leaving the club before the end of the year. Schalke insisted his run-in with Naldo had nothing to do with the decision.

In the same announcement, sporting director Jochen Schneider confirmed that Amine Harit and Nabil Bentaleb will train away from the rest of the squad for the time being.

Schneider insisted both players are inarguably talented but that Harit needs “time to think”, with a 24-game winless run supposedly not enough to snap him into concentration, before adding that Bentaleb and the club “just don’t fit together.”

It isn’t just the results or the dressing room impacting the club, but figures higher up, too.

Earlier the same day, technical director Michael Reschke left the club.

Considered an expert in squad building and scouting, Reschke’s arrival was celebrated in the summer of 2019. Just 18 months later he’s gone with no real transfer market success to speak of. Reschke also failed to convince sporting director Jochen Schneider to part ways with David Wagner at the end of last season.

Wagner then had a say on Reschke’s transfer plans, pushing the club to chase a new right-back rather than goalkeeper Alexander Schwolow after Reschke had already agreed a deal with his club SC Freiburg.

By the time Reschke finally got his way and Manuel Baum was appointed, the relationship between Reschke and Schneider had been badly damaged.

When the season started, Baum was (managerially) unemployed and working on Sky as a pundit. His predicted table had Schalke in 15th. Clearly he hasn’t managed to convince the players that he does believe in their abilities.

Former chairman Clemens Tönnies has still been present at some games, even though he was suspended last year after making racist remarks and then resigned after fans again protested his position after a controversial coronavirus outbreak at a slaughterhouse he owned.

Tönnies’ legacy was to leave Schalke with over €200m worth of debt, an albatross weighing so heavily around the club’s neck that they did not offer refunds to fans who had bought tickets for matches they couldn’t attend when the ongoing pandemic forced games behind closed doors.

This is clearly an entire club, an entire enterprise, an entire institution that is falling apart. From the boardroom, to the dressing room to the pitch, and everywhere in between. The club is a mess.

And so they travel to Mönchengladbach on Saturday, to face the last team they actually beat in a Bundesliga game. Before Weston McKennie left for Juventus. When fans were still in stadiums, when Wagner was in charge. When Tönnies was chairman and Schalke sat above Dortmund overnight.

It’s hard to believe that was all earlier this year and harder yet to imagine Schalke beating Gladbach this time around.